4-Quarter Lives

In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives Podcast, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is joined again by Seth Green, Dean of the University of Chicago’s Graham School, to explore what happens when longer lives meet shorter chapters. Seth argues that the two forces together mean more transitions, and that adaptation, not stored knowledge, is now the skill that matters most. He makes the case for a midlife that stretches from 35 to 75, and walks through his group’s three overlapping modes: reorient, flourish and steward. The conversation then turns to how the Graham School has grown from one flagship programme, the Leadership and Society Initiative, into a portfolio built around life stage rather than age, serving archetypes from the ‘reassessor’ to the ‘encore chapter builder’. Seth closes with why the alumni community is becoming the real draw, and what universities worldwide must do to make midlife learning a core mission rather than a sideline.

Seth Green is Dean of the University of Chicago’s Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies, a role he has held since 2021, now in a second five-year term. Under his leadership, Graham launched the Leadership and Society Initiative and has grown into a portfolio of programmes supporting learners across midlife. He was previously Founding Director of the Baumhart Center for Social Enterprise and Responsibility at Loyola University Chicago. A Marshall Scholar, he holds a J.D. from Yale, master’s degrees from Oxford and the London School of Economics, and a bachelor’s degree from Princeton.

In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives Podcast, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox welcomes back economist Andrew Scott to challenge the idea that ageing societies are destined for economic decline. Drawing on his latest research, Andrew explains why falling birth rates have not triggered the collapse so often predicted, and how adaptation, technology and longer working lives could deliver a substantial longevity dividend.

They discuss the striking contribution of over-50s, who account for more than all net employment growth in the EU over the period Andrew examined, and why investing in health and later-life work matters more than simply raising retirement ages. The conversation explores why a health system should measure health rather than just treat disease, and the emerging tension between AI and longer careers: experienced workers may become more valuable just as younger people struggle to gain experience. Andrew also shares his new chapter at Oxford and the Ellison Institute of Technology.

Andrew Scott is Principal Scientist, Economics, at the Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford, and Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford. After three decades at London Business School, his work now sits where economics, biology and AI meet. He is co-author, with Lynda Gratton, of The 100-Year Life, and author of The Longevity Imperative. Few people have done more to shape how we understand the economic and social consequences of longer lives, or to question whether an ageing society must also be a society in decline.

In this episode of 4-Quarter Lives, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox talks with Quentin Boyes, founder of Humbug, about the assumptions that sit behind the advertising older people see — and the customers businesses miss. Quentin has spent more than 35 years in brand and customer strategy. His current work, initially developed in partnership with Brunel University and supported by Innovate UK, demonstrates how brands can understand the mature consumer, known as the “Baby Boomer”,with greater precision using a set of new segmentation and mapping tools

Quentin’s objection to “55-plus” is straightforward: it does not tell you who you are talking to. We explore why marketing remains so attached to youth, how the rush into digital channels shaped that focus, and what happens when businesses carry an old picture of later life into a market of longer lives. His argument reaches beyond advertising. Understanding these customers involves product development, sales and customer service too.

Humbug’s research identifies six consumer groups within the baby boomer generation. Quentin and Avivah look at two contrasting examples: an older group comfortable with multiple digital channels, and a younger group that places particular value on trusted sources and printed newsletters. The differences are a useful reminder that age alone tells us little about someone’s relationship with technology, advertising or change. Trust, values and relevance deserve a closer look.

Adult children return home. Parents live longer. Caring responsibilities multiply. People inherit, move house, reduce their working hours or start another business. Quentin describes how these events can change both the money available and the priorities competing for it. The conversation then turns to travel, where the bucket list can obscure a desire for fresh ideas, and to Quentin’s own experience using AI to plan a family trip. For anyone navigating the New Q3 — or serving its consumers — this is a lively conversation about the lives hidden behind the labels.

Quentin Boyes is the founder of Humbug, a consultancy helping brands understand and engage older consumers. A brand and customer relationship strategist with more than 35 years’ experience across travel, health, consumer goods, sustainability and the public sector, he explores how life events, values, and changes in the way we process information, shape buying decisions as we age.

www.bahhumbugs.co.uk

https://www.linkedin.com/company/bahhumbugs

https://www.linkedin.com/in/quentinboyes

Ten years after The 100-Year Life changed the conversation about longevity, London Business School professor Lynda Gratton returns with Living the 100-Year Life, a more personal and practical exploration of how to build a long, meaningful working life.

In this conversation with Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, Lynda explains why she began her new book not with research, but with stories from her own life. Those stories eventually became eight threads that help us understand what makes a life resilient: mastery, cooperation, knowing, amplifying, friendship, intimacy, calm and adventure.

Together, they explore why calm is so fragile in midlife, why adventure is essential to reinvention, and how AI can either amplify our capabilities or undermine the human skills that make us valuable.

They also discuss the disappearance of age-defined life stages, the importance of personal agency, and Lynda’s next adventure: co-directing London Business School’s new Institute for Work, Longevity and Careers, with Herminia Ibarra.

It’s a conversation about work, but also about the unexpected freedoms of growing older, the pleasure of remaining curious, and the courage to become more fully ourselves.

Lynda Gratton is one of the foremost global thought-leaders on the future of work, named by ‘Business Thinkers 50’ as one of the top fifteen business thinkers and described as a ‘rock star’ teacher. Lynda is Professor of Management Practice at London Business School, where her ‘The future of work’ elective is one of the school’s most popular courses. In 2016 she and Andrew Scott co-wrote The Hundred Year Life, and her Living the Hundred Year Life was published in 2026. It is accompanied by The Life Threads Journal and an 8 episode podcast - Life Threads. To learn more about your threads go to www.livingthe100yearlife.com to complete the Life Threads Assessment. Lynda is also co- director of the recently launched SARI Foundation Institute of Work, Careers and Longevity.

What have I learned from a summer of conversations about longer lives?

Looking back over this season of the 4-Quarter Lives podcast, I realised that my guests – despite coming from very different worlds – kept circling around three big themes: identity, agency and experience.

Together, they offer a surprisingly coherent map of the New Q3: the 25 or so years between roughly 50 and 75 that are emerging as a distinct new quarter of life.

In this solo episode, I draw together some of the ideas that stayed with me from the season.

Charlie Rogers introduced me to the idea of becoming “undefinable” and finding the golden thread connecting the different parts of a life. Jane Moffatt and Denise Taylor explored what happens when professional identities begin to loosen and achievement gives way to questions of meaning. Jane Duncan Rogers offered another beautiful description of this process: unmasking.

But freedom alone isn’t enough. Anne Button and Rachel Cohen’s Change Makers programme points towards the kind of midlife learning infrastructure longer lives will require. Richard Smith explains why financial clarity is really about agency – and why what many of us need is a “pensions hug”. Briana Gilmore reframes accessibility as something much bigger: longevity design.

Finally, there is experience. Alastair Greener argues that rather than separating generations at work, we should “tangle” them. And Victoria Tomlinson, author of Expiry Date Never, asks why organisations continue to filter out experienced people just as demographic change and AI may be making human judgement, context and pattern recognition more valuable.

Different conversations. One emerging map.Longer lives don’t simply add years. They change who we can become, the choices available to us, and the value of everything we accumulate along the way. Perhaps the New Q3 is where we finally start figuring out what all those extra years are for.

IN THIS EPISODE

I explore:

* Why becoming less definable may be one of the freedoms of Q3

* The difference between purpose and meaning

* Why longer lives require us to become better at transitions

* Why education shouldn’t stop after Q1

* How money becomes a source of agency in Q3

* Why accessibility is really longevity design

* The difference between generational differences and life-stage differences

* Why organisations should tangle the generations

* How AI may increase rather than diminish the value of human experience

* Why the “50-plus” category has outlived its usefulness

* What identity, agency and experience tell us about the emerging New Q3

GUESTS REFERENCED

Charlie Rogers – Undefinable Community and the idea of the “golden thread”

Jane Moffatt – identity, transition, meaning and life after full-time work

Dr Denise Taylor – ThriveSpan, Jung and the inward turn in the second half of life

Anne Button & Rachel Cohen – Change Makers at the University of Colorado Denver and new models of midlife learning

Richard Smith – pensions, financial clarity and the “pensions hug”

Briana Gilmore – accessibility as innovation and longevity design

Alastair Greener – Generationally Speaking and “tangling the generations”

Jane Duncan Rogers – Gifted by Grief, mortality and ageing as “unmasking”

Victoria Tomlinson – Expiry Date Never, ageism, experience and the future of work

In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives Podcast, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is joined by Victoria Tomlinson, founder and CEO of Next-Up, to talk about her new book, Expiry Date Never, and the systems quietly pushing experienced people out of work. Tomlinson argues the problem is not age but obsolete workplace design, and that the first thing to fix is recruitment, where candidates are screened out at 50 and increasingly at 40. She makes the case for scrapping the 50-plus label, which collapses 66 years of life into one category.

The conversation turns to AI, where hallucinated reports and expensive mistakes are, she argues, raising rather than lowering the value of experienced judgment. They close on money, purpose, and what a good transition looks like when it starts a decade early rather than a year out.

Victoria Tomlinson is the founder and CEO of Next-Up, helping professional services firms and boards turn partner/leadership retirement and succession into an advantage rather than a risk. She was previously a director at EY and ran her own communications agency for thirty years. She is an international keynote speaker, TEDx speaker (‘A Generation of Wasted Talent’), Amazon bestselling author, a Teaching Fellow at Lancaster University and a Fellow of the RSA. Her new book, Expiry Date Never, written with co-author Louise Ballard, is published by Pearson in September 2026.

Useful Links:

* Expiry Date Never – Age is the New Superpower

In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives Podcast, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is joined by Jane Duncan Rogers, author and end-of-life planning pioneer, for a wide-ranging conversation about facing mortality with honesty and even joy. Jane makes the case that end-of-life planning is a form of emotional liberation, freeing the energy we tie up in avoidance. They explore grief and widowhood, the ‘after-self’ that emerges from loss, and Jane’s image of the heart as a flowing stream with gates that open and close. The conversation ranges across assisted dying, ageing without children, the power of micro-communities, and the confidence and voice that can emerge in Q3. Above all, Jane reframes ageing as an unmasking — an invitation to meet the person you never expected to become, and to greet later life with what she calls quiet joy.

Jane Duncan Rogers is a writer, speaker, and pioneer in the field of end-of-life planning. She is the author of Gifted by Grief, written in the years following the death of her first husband, and the creator of the Substack Embracing Age, recently recognised at the Advantage of Age Awards. In 2016 she founded an end-of-life planning organisation, which she led for eight years before passing it on. Now in her late sixties, she writes and speaks candidly about grief, widowhood, ageing without children, and the emotional liberation that comes from planning honestly for the end of life.

In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives Podcast, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is joined by pensions expert Richard Smith for a conversation about money, longevity and the decades we spend planning for a future we can’t predict. Smith explains why the average UK worker now juggles three or four separate pensions across a churning career, and why almost 80% of people have no idea what they hold in total. The two explore the coming UK pensions dashboard, which will finally connect over 100 million scattered records, and unpack why an income figure people can relate to matters far more than a headline pot. They turn to the harder questions Q3 raises — how to spend when you don’t know how long you’ll live, why even wealthy savers freeze at decumulation, and why women face a double longevity-and-pensions gap. Throughout, Richard argues for awareness delivered with what he calls a pensions hug.

Richard Smith is a UK-based career pensions professional who began in pensions administration and has spent the latter part of his career focused, in his words, narrowly and deeply on one topic: pensions dashboards. He helped the UK government define the data standards underpinning the dashboard technology ecosystem and has held roles across the programme since. Now working largely pro bono and independently, he is a leading consumer-advocacy voice for the initiative. He has toured Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Norway researching how other countries connect citizens’ pensions, and advises fintechs on making pension data understandable to ordinary savers.

In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is joined by Anne Button and Rachel Cohen to explore how universities can support purposeful midlife transitions at scale.

Anne and Rachel co-developed Change Makers, a 15-week programme based at University of Colorado Denver, designed for adults navigating their next chapter. Built for accessibility, the course runs evenings, blends online and in-person sessions, and costs under $4,000. That design choice also brings in people who are still working, often overlooked by traditional, year-long, high-cost programmes.

They explain how Change Makers follows a clear three-part arc. Inner reflection helps participants reassess identity, values, and strengths. Outer exploration opens up new options through speakers, peer exchange, and real examples. Integration turns insight into action through short, practical 12-week plans that build momentum.

A standout feature is the peer advisory process. Small, rotating groups help participants test ideas, voice long-held ambitions, and move from stuck to forward motion. Anne and Rachel share stories of alumni who have redesigned careers, stepped into community leadership, launched new ventures, or found new ways to contribute and engage.

The conversation also looks beyond the classroom. Change Makers is influencing university thinking on lifelong learning, workforce participation, and ageing. Its alumni are feeding into local media, policy discussions, and community initiatives, reframing older adults as experienced contributors rather than liabilities.

Looking ahead, Anne and Rachel outline plans for a fully virtual programme, a stronger alumni network, and a wider national reach. Their shared aim is clear. Help more people age with confidence, direction, and impact.

Anne Button is the founding director of Change Makers at the University of Colorado Denver. She designed the programme to fill a gap in higher education for midlife adults navigating transitions in work and life and thinking intentionally about what comes next. Anne focuses on making this kind of learning practical, affordable, and accessible. Her work positions universities as active players in longer careers and ageing societies.

Rachel Cohen is a gerontologist, social worker, and founder of Aging Dynamics. Her work focuses on age-friendly communities, systems change, and helping individuals shape meaningful later chapters. Rachel brought deep expertise in ageing, community planning, and facilitation to Change Makers, where she co-led curriculum and peer advisory processes. She works nationally with organisations and cities to support longer, more engaged lives.

Useful Links:

● Change Makers Programme at University of Colorado Denver: https://www.ucdenver.edu/change-makers

● Aging Dynamics: https://www.aging-dynamics.com

● Anne Button on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anne-button-cudenver-change-makers-program/

● Rachel Cohen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelbcohen/

In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives Podcast, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is joined by Jane Moffett, author of What Next? and the Founder of KANGAROO Coaching, for a conversation about the life stage still awkwardly labelled retirement. Moffett argues the adjustment after leaving work can take up to seven years, because stopping work is a major psychological transition involving shifts in identity, values and meaning — none of which can be hurried. She maps six recurring challenges, from the manner of leaving to the reshaping of time, structure and relationships, and pushes back on the pressure to name a purpose, offering meaning as the more useful word. The conversation turns to gendered career shapes — the male mountain versus women’s rolling landscape — the layer of Q3 women hitting their strongest decades, and why so few couples do this thinking together. Both agree: start early, and don’t go it alone.

Jane Moffett has spent thirty years supporting women through major life transitions, particularly the points where the professional and the personal intersect — becoming a mother, leaving the workplace, returning after a career break. Her interest in the transition out of work grew from conversations with friends of her own generation: the first large cohort of professional women to have built full careers, and to face stopping work with no blueprint to follow. Finding nothing written for women in the UK on the subject, she researched and wrote What Next?, a six-part map of the challenges of redefining retirement.

Useful Links:

Book - From Retired to Defined